Opinion | Baltimore has a detention problem -

Todd Oppenheim is a lawyer in the Baltimore City Felony Trial Division of the Maryland Office of the Public Defender.

Imagine spending a year behind bars waiting for your day in court, only to have a jury find you not guilty after deliberating for 20 minutes. That’s barely the amount of time it takes folks to get settled in the jury room and vote — never mind reviewing the tangible evidence in the case.

It happened to a client of mine in a Baltimore City murder trial last summer. Another client, also charged with a felony in Baltimore, had his case dumped by the state at the first trial date after he spent more than five months in jail. Sure, they both got out, but these people can never reclaim that time away from work, family and life.

Particularly egregious for hundreds of individuals like my two clients whose trials are pending in Baltimore City is that they are not being housed in Baltimore pretrial. Sometimes it’s in Jessup, 20 miles away. Sometimes, in rarer instances, it’s in the outer reaches of the state.

When you’re arrested in Baltimore City, authorities normally take you to the Central Booking and Intake Facility. Central Booking, as its name implies, handles the booking process. It also houses arrestees for temporary detention pending a bail hearing (within 24 hours of arrest), a judicial bail review, if necessary, (next business day) and, finally, potential pretrial detention. The building can hold about 900 people. Baltimore has nearly double that number sitting in jail awaiting court dates for new charges, violations of probation and a handful of warrants from other jurisdictions. So, the extra detainees need to go somewhere.

That destination used to be a complex of older buildings adjacent to Central Booking formerly known as the Baltimore City Detention Center. The complex included a women’s detention center. For the most part, male arrestees spent about 30 days shuffling through Central Booking. Then they’d usually move to another building, usually within a couple of city blocks.

In July 2015, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) threw a wrench in the pretrial detention “two-step” by beginning to shutter the detention center. Spurred by a corrections officers’ corruption scandal, not necessarily by the outdated and decrepit conditions, Hogan closed the ancient men’s detention center building.

Public defenders did not know what would be done with our clients. Gradually, the other buildings were closed, including the women’s. (Women are now mostly in a separate tier of Central Booking.) So, after losing a third of Central Booking and all of the detention center, the men were shipped out to prisons run by the state’s Division of Corrections. Two are near Central Booking. However, hundreds of pretrial detainees are now housed in the Jessup Correctional Institution, supposedly separated from inmates serving sentences. A few are even located in Cumberland, Hagerstown and on the Eastern Shore.

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The Jessup facility is about 20 miles south of Baltimore in Anne Arundel County. Housing pretrial detainees, who are presumed innocent, the location restricts their accessibility. Clients have said that pretrial detainees aren’t always kept separate from convicts. Clients have been placed on “lockup” and allowed only one hour out of their cells per day at Jessup.

Jessup is set up for attorneys to visit clients who are serving sentences, not pending trial dates. As public defenders, we have state employee and bar association identification cards allowing us pretrial access at any time (literally). Yet the procedure is never smooth. You show up, you get searched — thoroughly. The rules change. Women’s dress is restricted. We essentially lose a day of work seeing clients at Jessup, which judges have yet to understand. We desperately need a video link for quick client access. At the detention center, we could see clients with relative ease. We had an office in its bowels linked to our computer network.

Three men died at Central Booking this year; all were awaiting trial for relatively minor crimes. Meanwhile, folks are being sent out to prisons such as the one in Jessup with no solution on the horizon. These are injustices that civil rights organizations need to investigate. Someone’s physical location in jail may not seem cruel and unusual — a punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment — but treating Baltimore City residents differently from any other counties’ should. And so should affecting defendants’ access to representation.

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